A few hours before his death, Abdullah Dilsouz was playing cricket with other child refugees in the wasteland behind the port of Calais. Friends said he was excited to be nearing the end of a long journey from Afghanistan, and optimistic that he would soon be able to join his brother in London.

But the 15-year-old was run over by a refrigeration truck on 22 December – one of three asylum-seekers to be killed on the roads outside the port in the past month. A fourth has been seriously injured and remains in a coma in hospital and on Sunday night an Iraqi refugee had his legs severed by a train near Dunkirk.

Q&A

The Calais camp explained

Why did Calais become a staging post?

Refugees have been gathering in Calais on their way to the UK for decades. Periodically the French authorities attempt to prevent them from coming but asylum seekers continue to arrive. Some pay people-smugglers to get them into lorries parked near the port while those who have no money try to conceal themselves in moving trucks.

Who travels to camps on the Channel?

Many asylum seekers have relatives or friends in the UK or have some level of English language skills. But the 1,000 or so refugees currently living in Calais and Dunkirk represent a very small proportion of refugees seeking asylum across Europe.

Although the situation in Northern France attracts attention because it is at the UK border, the numbers gathered here are tiny compared with the 100,000- plus who arrived in Europe in 2017, the vast majority of whom intend to claim asylum elsewhere in Europe.

What are politicians doing to change the situation?

The British government has contributed to a £17m joint Anglo-French package of security measures, including the construction of a 1km-long concrete wall, aimed at preventing asylum seekers from getting close lorries arriving at the port.

But charities say extra security does not prevent the arrival of new refugees. They want the British government to make it easier for vulnerable unaccompanied children to travel legally and for France to accept that there will always be some refugees in Calais, and provide dignified reception centres.

Photograph: David Levene

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Charities say the deaths are the result of worsening living conditions for migrants in northern France, prompting them to take more risks as they try to reach the UK.

As the French president, Emmanuel Macron, travels to Calais on Tuesday to discuss the re-emerging refugee population with charities and local officials before a summit with Theresa May on Thursday, the dire conditions in which about 80 unaccompanied child asylum-seekers are living is again high on the political agenda.

French media say Macron plans to ask May to allow in unaccompanied children and adults with family in the UK, and demand more money to help in managing the migrant crisis in northern France.

Macron visits Calais before migration crisis meeting with May

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The death of Abdullah, who had a legal right to come to the UK under family reunification legislation, made few headlines in France where migrant deaths have become routine (there have been more than 200 since 1999). But it triggered profound anguish among the local charities that were trying to help him to safety.

The charity Safe Passage has launched a petition calling on the French and British governments to ensure that there are no more deaths at the border. They hope that ministers at the Anglo-French summit this week will agree to speed up asylum processes and make safe and legal routes for child refugees travelling to the UK more accessible.

Jan Agha, 21, was with Abdullah, his cousin, on the night he died. Both came from a small village in Nangarhar province, a unsettled area of eastern Afghanistan where the Taliban and Islamic State have been vying for control.

After a long journey across Europe, neither had any money to pay people smugglers to help them get across the Channel, so every night they were trying to make their way independently, waiting near motorway junctions close to the port, hoping that lorries would slow down sufficiently for them to take a chance to climb on and conceal themselves.

“There is no safe way to do it; it is really dangerous every time you try,” Agha said, speaking through an interpreter. “That night neither of us much wanted to walk to the motorway – we were exhausted. But it was cold in the woods where we were sleeping, so we decided to try again.”

Abdullah was walking along the road behind his cousin. Sometime after 11pm Agha turned to check the boy was still following him and saw him being hit by a lorry travelling very fast towards the port. The driver did not stop, but the truck dragged the 15-year-old along the road for about 100 metres. When Agha found the body of his cousin, he passed out from the shock.

Someone called the police, but the driver has not been found. Agha spent a few hours in hospital and gave details of the incident to the police, before returning to sleep in a tent in the woods. He is so traumatised by the experience that he has abandoned his own attempts to travel to the UK and hopes to claim asylum in France. But the process of registering is not easy and, in the meantime, he continues to be harassed by local police who recently sprayed teargas at him as he slept.

Every few days police arrive at the woods, a few hundred metres from the site of the old camp, which was demolished in October 2016. The officers ask the several hundred people from Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia and Afghanistan who are living in the woods to move on. Refuse collectors remove tents and sleeping bags.

Charities say about 1,000 migrants are living in small encampments in Calais and Dunkirk, most of them hoping to travel to the UK because they have family there. Local authorities are determined to avoid a return of the scale of the previous camp, where an estimated 10,000 migrants were crammed in close confinement, and make life uncomfortable for migrants in the (largely mistaken) belief that this will stop people from coming.

A report published late last year by Helprefugees concluded that sanitation conditions fell “significantly short” of internationally recognised humanitarian standards and warned of a “threat to public health”.

A recent UN report criticised the arrangements for safe drinking water and sanitation with 700 migrants relying on just 10 portable toilets and water from 10 taps.

“Conditions have really deteriorated in the past few months; there has been more violence from police, more action taken to dissuade people from being here. Any sign of a new camp is demolished. Police spray teargas on possessions and you can’t sleep in a sleeping bag that has been sprayed,” said Rowan Farrell, a volunteer with the Refugee Info Bus.

When temperatures drop below zero, a warehouse opens its doors, offering about 200 spaces to sleep. There has been unhappiness that the centre has remained mostly closed this winter, but unexpectedly opened its door for two nights before Macron’s visit, despite the relatively mild temperatures.

Abdullah had been in Calais for about 45 days, and had been upset by conditions. “We had nowhere to live, no water. We didn’t know it would be like this,” Agha said. “But he was very happy that he was almost there. He was hoping to get to London to see his brother who he last saw seven years ago. England seemed so close, he wanted to keep trying to get there.”

He described Abdullah as a very calm, intelligent person who wanted to continue his education. He brought out his phone, to show a picture of Abdullah in the mortuary covered up to the neck with a white sheet. “I want to make sure no one else suffers like this.”

The Refugee Youth Service had contacted local authorities on Abdullah’s behalf on 14 December, alerting them that there was an unaccompanied child in danger and in need of child protection services. Sabriya Guivy, legal adviser with the charity, said there was no space in December in the emergency shelters for young people, and there was also a confusion over his name. He was not offered somewhere to stay.

Legal volunteers were prepared to help him with a reunification application to allow him to join his 19-year-old brother in London, but these take so long and are not always successful, so it is hard to persuade young people to stop risking their lives on the road.

A week after Abdullah’s death a truck carrying rolls of paper drove into a ditch, and a migrant was found crushed beneath the paper inside. Last week, on 9 January, another migrant was found on the A16; the cause of death was believed to be falling from a moving vehicle.

Loan Torondel, who manages the local charity L’Auberge des Migrants, is angry that responsibility often falls on him, an untrained 21-year-old, to call the relatives of the dead. “Normally if a child dies in a road accident, the authorities will call the family to explain. In Calais that’s not the case. We have to do it,” he said. His organisation raised money for Abdullah’s body to be repatriated.

“It’s very difficult explaining to the parents what happened because they don’t understand about the conditions in Calais. I don’t know what to say when they ask me: ‘Why did you let my child climb on a moving trucks to try to go to Britain?’ It feels really wrong when relatives travel to Calais, and there is only us to meet them at the station, no one from the prefecture.”

French and British politicians needed to understand that the situation in Calais is not going to disappear and that life needs to be made safer and more humane for refugees, Torondel added. “People die because they don’t have a safe and sure way to cross the border. We need dignified accommodation for the refugees, we need better processes for claiming asylum in France, we need faster legal routes for people to be reunited with their family in the UK.”